Weekly Album: Week of 10/01 - 10/07 - State Songs

Apologies for the late post without any notice.

This week I listened to State Songs by John Linnell. Linnell is most known for being a part of They Might Be Giants, and I am quite familiar with the band's work so the music on here sounded fairly familiar to me. This music being short and quirky rock songs with lyrics that are a bit nonsensical and arrangements that are little strange for rock, but for Linnell are fairly standard. There a lot of keyboards doing strange things, strangest of all when the keyboard is carousel/band organ, so technically not a keyboard since no human actually plays it but the basis for it is a keyboard instrument. There are 4 tracks that feature it very prominently, but the two that stand out to me the most are "Utah" and "New Hampshire" as I'd say they stray the most from typical rock arrangements, sounding almost like circus music which I suppose is fitting for a carousel organ. The songs themselves are quite good, which is to be expected as Linnell has proven time and time again to be a very competent songwriting, even if his lyrics are arbritrary. This brings me to an interesting point about the album, that being the fact that almost none of these songs have anything to do with the states they are named after. Sure, the states are mentioned in the lyrics of the songs, but really you could replace them with any noun with the same syllables and it wouldn't change the meaning of them much. An obvious example being in the song, "Montana" which is mostly about someone's hospital stay where he figures out that "Montana was a leg" which is utter nonsense. But this isn't really an issue, as this is expected of Linnell, rather it is part of the charm of his songs. It is interesting to me hearing this half of the songwriting duo that makes up They Might Be Giants, because you can hear the parts that the other member, John Flansburgh, contributes to the songs they write together. Overall, State Songs is good album that I can see myself revisiting for something vaugely Giants-y. 8/10 album